rabidchipmnk

YET THEY COULDN'T AVOID THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY /cry Nah, I think that one was a bit of understandable catharsis. Bugs, though. Even if we spontaneously immediately decided to invest in nuclear, it would take 10-30 years to get any new plants online and we all know the world ends in like 2020. Now if it was a matter of the massive dumping grounds in Nevada and also sometimes just like, underground, under where people still live and work (?!?), that's a story I could have bought...

Forgot to mention, I thought they did a really good job on that, from conveying how the guy would be so charismatic that everyone would just excuse the behavior, to explaining why women don't always come forward and would rather just move on even taking professional hits, to how male colleagues should react to those sorts of revelations. And, heh, that it might behoove said male colleagues to have thought out their public response to this kind of thing ahead of time, like "I personally have not witnessed this kind of behavior from Chef Jeff because I am a male, but if I had I absolutely would condemn it and I support the victims who have come forward." Also condemn vs condone... man, those two words are kind of similar but actually totally opposite! I thought he was going to correct himself that way, which would have made more sense.

I assumed they tried that but we didn't see it... If the kid had turned off the phone already (probably a good move) then they're SOL.

I have a major nitpick... so I know for a fact that they are planning to close the last remaining operational power plant in CA. The one before that was San Onofre which actually makes sense if you were getting radioactivity ~50 miles from San Diego (assuming that somehow between 2013 when SONGS was shut down and the apocalypse, we hadn't taken all the radioactive stuff there and buried it in Nevada, as we probably would have?). But given that, I can't figure out how there isn't ANY PLACE on land between Silicon Valley and LA out of range of nuclear reactors? Yeah I can't really buy that. There seem to have been more never-builts than actually-builts, even. Especially since if you're sailing down to Mexico hugging the coast, you will pass possibly closer to San Onofre than you would have on the 5, since it's right on the beach there (I dunno, sea level rise? erosion?). But I guess if I can ignore the fact that the gas was supposed to have gone bad the last time they were in LA yet everyone is still driving and flying and sailing around... I should probably just ignore this too? I was fully expecting Erica to throat-punch Tandy when she was in labor and he wouldn't STFU. 100% justified, IMO.

So I was way late to this party... saw the first episode on a plane a couple weeks ago and Netflix-binged the rest of it when I got home. It's cute! Sorry it's canceled... But as an actual scientist I have to say: OMG, THAT IS SO NOT HOW PEER REVIEW WORKS, GUYS! The way you "prove" something is not to take the most famous figure in a field and have them personally read your theory and then everyone will think it's good! You write a paper, you submit it to a journal, the journal finds 2-3 other scientists to read it and then you have to respond to each of those comments (or the editor can say "this sucks, we're not going to publish it"). Especially in physics, arxiv.org I'm pretty sure accepts non-peer-reviewed manuscripts (that of course ideally will then be submitted for peer review), if you REALLY COULDN'T FIND any editor who would send his manuscript to reviewers (sometimes that happens if it's really bad-- I don't think that would be this case, though his attitude of "I'm right I'm right listen to me!" instead of "I've run some simulations and I've found this, here's my work and I look forward to hearing the reviewers' comments since you'll see this regards an issue of urgent societal relevance" probably wouldn't help). I was waiting for the point when he reconciled with his dad, who had been established as a respected mathematics professor (and thus probably knows something about peer review, if not orbital mechanics, which I would buy), and showed him the manuscript and that would help him prove/disprove it... but that never happened, which was weird. Also was Xavier supposed to be trained in math/physics? I wanted to know more about that. At the very least he would have grown up around a university setting, so how he didn't know how theories get proven is beyond me. We can barely get anyone to do anything about frigging climate change, and the lines of evidence (so, so many) there are WAY stronger than any one simulation of an asteroid trajectory... Second, what even was that program he was using to simulate asteroid impacts? You know that NASA actually is on that, right? And I assume they have similar calculations (though maybe not such a nice GUI... which my question is still unanswered where did he get that code??). So he probably even could avoid the whole peer review thing and just email those guys and be like "hey, there's this asteroid which I'm sure you know is in your database... I'm running some simulations and because of [XYZ but not theta] I'm coming up with results that show an impact; could you look over my work or maybe cross-compare it with the information you guys have to see if this is the same result?" Scientists are busy but generally like to be helpful (unless you come off as a crazy... we only have so many hours in a day). THAT SAID... suspension of disbelief etc etc this is far from the first show to fuck up how science works (BBT... Bones...) I thought it had a really sweet underlying message, about the balance between living for the future and living as if there is no future (the two leads); the parents grated a bit but otherwise it actually did a decent job balancing between workplace and ...non-workplace? comedy. And hey I'm not going to argue with Joshua Sasse taking off his shirt at least once an episode for seemingly no reason. We should get a beard-tervention up on him though. Just a little bit. Oh, and y'all should definitely see an aurora sometime in your lives if you haven't. Omg, amaaaaaahzing. (but you need >1 night there, it's not always visible, because space weather and also clouds.) Which also reminds me how bummed I am that I will be out of the country for the eclipse in August... see it!!

I posted on this (probably too much) in the all-episodes thread but... yeah. Assuming she and Pino have already had the conversation about what they need to be happy... she needs to break up with him, have like a month of honeymoon with Dev (I'm sure he'd be into it) and then go find some Italian dude who's a better fit for her. Of course, late-20s singlehood is a lot different in Europe than the US, is a fair point... There's a secondary motive of her career (life goals?) which was sort of teased but then dropped... making a big move like that for herself would be (IMO) a lot more defensible than doing it for a guy... but that's sort of what it's being portrayed as.

Is it terrible that I already knew the sign for "vagina" because I've been in enough Comic Con panels where the panelists say something crude, realize there is a poor ASL interpreter standing off to the side that signs everything they say, and then they keep trying escalating terms to see what the signs are in an infinite feedback loop? (Nah but Comic Con is pretty great for accessibility options actually!)

Seconded. Been there, dude. I have so been there with those feels.

Ah, internet dating... am I the only one who had a pretty decent experience (on OKC of all places but hey, I'm not gonna PAY for this nonsense)? I mean, there are the creeps of course, who e.g. message you even though we're an 8% match and he answered yes to "women are obligated to shave their legs and also to take the man's name when they get married and also yes there ARE circumstances under which someone is obligated to have sex with you" (all actual OKC questions... all obviously dealbreakers to escalating degrees). I hear it's very different coming at it as a guy, but omg the number of "sup" or "hey cutie" messages... I think I uniformly ignored all of those, because there are just so many hours in a day and if you don't have 8 seconds to write something substantial, I don't have time to respond to it. (interestingly, I think the two actual relationships I started online were where I messaged the guys... guess I win at this game???) Also is this the part where we should discuss Modern Romance? Actually Aziz's standup too. He has a whole bunch of stuff in there about online dating and specifically messaging and what works and obviously doesn't work. Anyway I know the point was to show how sucky it is, but man, a few of those should clearly not have passed the IRL filter... or maybe I'm just overly cautious.

So. This show. I liked it and I have so many thoughts on it. It's interesting to me that everyone seems to dislike the Francesca storyline. Which I kind of get, I really enjoyed the other episodes they did that were not that this season, but also just to me personally that one was faaaar too relatable. He falls for her because she's unattainable (which he even wrote on his pro/con list at the end). She represents a time in his life when he was happy and had none of the stresses of work/real life (Italy). Because their relationship is inherently temporary because geography, and the sucky nature of the internet dates he went on, and he's just so happy to realize that he can still feel feels for anyone, so every good thing about their interactions is magnified. And from her point of view, she's never known any other relationship from Pino, so she has absolutely zero perspective for whether it might be a good relationship or not, and also has zero perspective on whether this thing with Dev might be real or not, but also has like this false wall up which indicates "I'm in a relationship so nothing will happen" until you suddenly realize it's gone way over that line. Interestingly I watched this after getting only as far into Kimmy Schmidt S3 to where ...of course, the whole "we have too many options compared with previous generations, which is why we obsess over dating like we do and are less happy even though we really have more options" was a main theme of Aziz's Modern Romance, I thought, so this is entirely an expected theme to see in this show (as it was last season too). But then Tim and Eric Eric is TOTALLY RIGHT, because if she were to actually stay... then what? She's given up her whole life because of one month? That's a hell of a lot of pressure to put on that relationship, and any time they fight she'll be able to say "I moved here for you, I'm more invested in this relationship than you are because look at how much I sacrificed!" (*ahem* ...hypothetically) even if it's not really what happened because it was also about the city and the life and art history etc. And he'll feel guilty about that, and the relationship goes on longer than it should have because sunk costs etc etc... which, speaking of, if the point was to make Dev look like an irrational whiny baby by saying "you only used me!" in their last argument well then that mission was accomplished. Totally Team Francesca on that one. Ah, media that brings out the lit major in me... But yeah. As someone who has been on both sides of this equation at different times, this whole storyline rang VERY true to me. Other comments: it was an interesting choice to expand the universe of the show away from the main characters of last season... maybe just due to logistical constraints (I assume that's why there was like, one scene with Brian in the whole thing?), but I thought they handled it as well as they could have: that social circle still seems to exist (even if Jon Benjamin also only shows up for about 8 seconds), and there are only so many stories which can be told in a season...

It definitely wasn't a flashback. But I couldn't decide whether it was a real flash-forward, or just an imagining on her part of what might have been, which we had seen in the last episode (the literal ripping out of his heart and putting it in a wood chipper)... This show has all the feels. I'll post the rest in the all-eps thread.

But... Chris Pratt is also A Chris Who Sings? e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NbBGrBxRhs The thing which made me go from meh on Pine to kiiiiind of crushing on him was him putting on a terrible rocker wig and singing on the roof of a cabin in WHAS. Which probably says something really weird about my tastes...

Was gonna ask the same thing... I was multitasking but didn't think I was THAT distracted as to miss a whole scene? Not interested in new guy as a love interest for anyone. Kind of wish they'd kept Josh out on his own storyline too, I really enjoyed Rebecca/Valencia/Heather capers.

La fea más bella was actually the Mexican remake of the Colombian original, Yo soy Betty, la fea. Jaime Camil was the male protagonist. So he's a legit telenovela star too! (Kind of prefer the original one, LFMB was very Televisa-ised. But sillier, IIRC. Of course, the way Armando Mendoza acts in the original would be setting off all sorts of red flag anger issue alerts in my brain if he were a real person and I would not advise any friend of mine to date him ever, but... telenovelas... Still a pretty good one.) This concludes your random telenovela trivia session.

did one this season, too. (If you haven't watched it, it's actually a lot more serious than you might think from the premise. But, also humorous.)

...Antarctica has ice sheets, not ice caps. /geophysicistnitpick. Though honestly with the science education he probably got, I'm sort of impressed he didn't call them glaciers or icebergs or something. I'm not sure how a smile could melt them, but you sure should worry about climate change... oh, wait... Um. Yeah. Someone's 6th grade homeschool curriculum covered similes? He... has really legible handwriting though? And made almost no grammar mistakes!

True story which amused me at the time: at Comic Con last year one of the bags was advertising this show (the networks put various entities on them every year, but they're handed out at random because if you let everyone root through so they get Batman v Superman it would be chaos). Multiple people came up and said "we're Christian, we cannot have this bag, because it has demons." The ones who really insisted... then were okay with Supernatural bags instead.<br /><br />Anyway, sounds kind of vanilla, though I will give extra consideration to the eye candy.

Really? I was waiting for it to happen from the beginning of the press conference. Classic "gonna get killed" setup. And, y'know, we all knew Greg wasn't going to make it to the last day of camp...

Can I just say, the Ben/McKinley dynamic was my favorite part of the whole new series. And I'm not even that big a fan of Bradley Cooper. The sad part is, do you think if they DID use it, they would even be made fully aware of the possible side effects? Or JB would just be "oh well they're not having sex anyway so we don't need to even mention to them that birth defects would be possible if they were having sex, because they're definitely not." I'd like to think that they're legal frigging adults who can make their own medical and life decisions and that the doctors they'd see would ethically put their foot down and insist on having private doctor-patient conversations with these grown-adult children, but... well, you know..

Josiah and Marjorie are able to help Joy Anna enroll in a community college close to their university. It's at times a difficult rooming situation, but let's face it, it's way less crowded than the one they're leaving. About a year later, Josiah has finally been able to articulate what he's known for a long time. He and his new boyfriend are still close with Marjorie and her new boyfriend, and everyone's accepting of everyone else and there are platonic, co-ed front-hugs all around because that's completely not a big deal in normal, functional social circles. The lost girls and Jackson are well-liked in their public elementary, middle, and eventually high schools and many years from now each of them graduates from a reasonably-priced state college. Jana and Jinger also enroll in community college; there's a strong learning curve, especially with their two other jobs, but in an encouraging learning environment they flourish, and eventually Jana transfers to a four-year college to study paleontology and Jinger studies engineering with a minor in photography, because it's good to be well-rounded. (I guess the wealthy philanthropic couple really stepped up, they probably got tax breaks or something, sure, that makes sense, right?) Oh and they both have IUDs. Joy Anna too. Man, this is really fun. And sad. Fun and sad. (I don't mean to speculate one way or the other about Josiah's sexuality; more that I hope if one of them is gay, it happens like that.) To bring it back around to the topic at hand, I would *totally* watch this show.

The actor doing his voice is not the kid, but is the same guy in both. I hadn't realized the kid was dubbed in the movie until I heard the exact same voice on newArty.

Slight tangent: I looked up Craig Wedren's other stuff on Spotify, and it is quite good!

1) it so should be, though. I swear, the (original!!) music through this thing... 2) I've been trying unsuccessfully to come up with some story that makes sense for why there would be a two-headed zoot suit man in a musical otherwise about the death penalty. The spandex body suits are... I think the electr..i...city? 3) it's not in this episode, but the whole "I had no idea you were so creative" "I assumed you knew I was creative because you're creative... nevermind, whether or not you're creative, I think you're very talented" exchange was so cute and more of those two together please.

I had a brief, fleeting moment of something approximating basic respect for Jeremy when he pulled the ol' "she already told me what happened" *wait for confession* line... because at least it meant he had two brain cells to rub together. But then he turned into a self-righteous ass and it passed. Seriously, it's not like he's all morally-upright, banging Rachel WHILE HE WAS STILL ENGAGED? Part of me still wishes Rachel and Adam had run away together. They're such horrible people, but they're horrible-great together which somehow cancels it out. At least have some days or weeks of beach-sex before they figure out how to totally ruin it...

Man, this one's good too. How about the scene where Claude invites Suzie to dinner to "go over the blocking" with a giant plant in his face? Or the Victor/Gene hiding/Bugs-Bunny-esque chase scene with ridiculous mismatch between velocities and positions? Yaron's Israeli accent? And Archibald Doohickey? "It's the only family I know, other than my own family." Onions are so good on a sandwich, too.